Local News

Marv Carlock's gift comes back to him

A dreaded cancer diagnosis turns into the gift of a lifetime

Marv Carlock and his dog Katie at his home in Laird. (Jeff Rice / Sterling Journal-Advocate)

LAIRD, Colo. -- When Marv Carlock tried to walk into his favorite coffee spot in the little village of Hagler, Neb., one morning in 2013, he couldn't figure out why his body wouldn't do what he wanted it to.

"I just couldn't get my feet to go where I wanted 'em to," he said. "I couldn't figure out what was wrong."

Fortunately, Carlock is a take-charge kind of guy. He didn't waste any time getting himself to his regular doctor in Yuma 35 miles away. At first the doctor said he thought Carlock had suffered a "mini-stroke" but it was going to be three months before he could get a follow-up.

That wasn't soon enough for the then-62-year-old Carlock so he drove to the North Colorado Medical Center Emergency Room in Greeley. Several days and a battery of tests later he received the dreaded news.

"They told me it was non-Hodgkin lymphoma," he said. "At first I couldn't even say it, let alone know what it was."

He found out soon enough. Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, according to the American Cancer Society's web site, is "a cancer that starts in white blood cells called lymphocytes, which are part of the body's immune system." The disease is spread through the circulatory system and, in Carlock's case, centered in his brain.

"My wife was pretty shook up about it, but we talked on the way back," he said. "We decided we were going to kick its ass. That's what we told it every morning - 'I'm gonna' kick your ass.' And that's what we did."

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Delivering said kicking meant that Carlock, a retired natural gas and pipeline worker, entrepreneur, and one-time rodeo bull rider, was in a fight for his life. What followed was 18 months of constant trips to Greeley and Sterling for treatment. Carlock can't even begin to guess the miles he racked up riding to and from treatments.

"I'd go to Greeley and be in the hospital there for anywhere from five to seven days, and then they'd let me go home for a week, and then I'd have to go to Sterling for more treatment, and after a week or so I'd go back to Greeley," he said.

Carlock said at first he dreaded the treatments because he'd heard about the horrible nausea and other side effects.

"I didn't have it too bad at all," he said. "I know other folks have had a terrible time with it, but I had it pretty easy."

"Pretty easy" is a relative term; Carlock lost 35 pounds during the process without even trying.

When he talks about the experience, however, Marv Carlock doesn't talk about the fear or the discomfort. For one thing, he doesn't remember much of it, and nurses at the David Walsh Cancer Center in Sterling confirmed that the anti-nausea medication that's administered often causes patients to sleep a lot.

What he does remember is the people, and he remembers them fondly.

"The doctors, the nurses, even the people that cleaned the rooms, they were just the sweetest," Carlock said.

He remembers their names, or at least parts of their names. He especially remembers Dr. Ariel Soriano of the North Colorado Cancer Institute.

"If I won the lottery, I'd give half of it to those guys," he said. "They are all overworked and underpaid."

Then there were the nurses and medical technicians - Laurie, Denise, Dorthea, Joy, and others. Denise, it turned out, used to bake pies for the sale barn restaurant at Imperial, Neb., and Carlock admits he is intimately familiar with those pies.

"After she told me that, I was laying there (during a treatment) and I dreamed that I looked up and saw the biggest double-crust cherry pie you ever saw," he said with a laugh.

After that, pie was a recurring theme in Carlock's visits to Sterling.

Like many cancer survivors, Carlock credits his sense of humor with helping him get through the 6 months of treatment. On one occasion, when his wife MaryAnn walked into the room, he pretended he didn't know her, to tease the attending nurse, who had never met Mrs. Carlock.

"I said flirted with her, pretended she'd walked into the wrong room, asked her if she wanted to go home with me," Carlock said. "(The nurse) said, 'Do you know this man?' and my wife said, 'Oh, we've met.'"

When he was able, Carlock entertained his caretakers with rodeo stories and tales about his days with Kansas-Nebraska Gas Co. and Bitter Creek Pipeline, and he told them about his business selling flatbed and stock trailers. When talking about his attempts to make it as a rodeo cowboy, he pretends to complain that his skills were never fully appreciated.

"Those other guys took eight seconds to rode a bull, but heck, I got it done in one or two seconds," he said. "It don't take me long to ride a bull."

Once the caretakers caught on to his humor, he said, they returned in kind.

"You have to have a sense of humor about it," he said.

You also have to have friends. Carlock said he often relied on friends to drive him to and from his treatments because MaryAnn, who works for the City of Wray, had to hold the job that provided the health insurance that paid for everything. There is a small group of close friends and family who were happy to help. He is especially grateful to Jim Neese of Wray.

"I spent a lot of time in the car with Jim," Carlock said. "He never complained, always offered, acted like it was an honor just to help. That's the kind of guy he is."

As it turns out, "the kind of guy" Jim Neese is happens to be is fairly common in small agricultural towns. Out of the blue one day some friends decided to have a benefit for the Carlocks. Marv protested that MaryAnn's health care insurance, along with his own pension and money he'd saved from his trailer business, handled all of the costs, so a benefit really wasn't all that necessary. But the friends were gently insistent - maybe they knew something about Marv Carlock that he had yet to find out about himself - and so the benefit went forward. One of the first people Marv saw at the benefit, which was held at the Elks Lodge in Wray, was Aaron Bickley, a long-time friend for whom Carlock had organized a benefit 32 years earlier, and who was eager to return the favor.

The result was a gift that Carlock couldn't have imagined.

"They raised thousands of dollars," Carlock said. "There were 400 people at the benefit, some of 'em I didn't even know, and a lot of them said I'd help them before and they wanted to pay that back."

That was when Marv and MaryAnn Carlock realized how many lives they'd touched. Throughout his ordeal, Marv thought he was the grateful recipient of other people's kindness; turns out, they were just returning to him what he'd been giving them all along.

Marv agreed to accept the money, but kept only half of it, which he invested toward future health care. The other half went into an account from which the Carlocks made a number of anonymous donations to others in need.

"We decided we needed to pay it forward," he said.

Marv Carlock's cancer is in remission now but he still has to make occasional trips to Greeley for checkups. He looks forward to the time when he is cancer-free and no longer has to go in for the tests.

"One of these days, they'll tell me, 'We don't need to see you anymore,'" he said. "That'll be a good day."

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